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How good are Udemy’s online courses? Tips to get you started

Udemy is an online learning platform that brings together students and instructors from all over the world. Some courses are available for free while others are paid courses that may cost several hundred Dollars.

You do need to create a free account to use some of the site's functionality, for instance to sign up for free courses.

Video courses consist of a fixed number of recorded lectures that students can watch as often as they like. Courses may also include labs in which students need to complete tasks on their own.

Supplementary materials may be provided as well, and there is a discussion platform that students can use to discuss lessons or ask questions.

How good are those courses? There is no definitive answer to that question as it depends largely on the course itself.  There are however certain methods that you can use to find out about a course before you subscribe to it or pay money for it.

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Udemy course selection tips

  1. Make sure you read the course description properly. It includes what you can expect from the course, information about the teacher or teachers, the requirements and target audience, and the curriculum.
  2. Almost as important are reviews by students who are subscribed to the course. Those can reveal information that you cannot obtain unless you subscribe to the course as well. You may read about issues that students had with the course for example.
  3. A Free Preview is always available. This is probably the best option to find out whether a course is for your or not. It is limited to five minutes by default which means that you can watch one or two lessons of that course before the time runs out. It is usually enough to watch the introductory video.
  4. You can message the lecturer with a click on the name. Useful if you have questions that you need answered before you make the signing up decision,.
  5. Beginner courses are not highlighted but if you find words such as beginners, from scratch, fundamentals or getting started, it is almost always a course that starts at the very beginning.
  6. Third-party sites offer coupons for Udemy courses. A deal on DroidLife for example made be sign up for several Android development courses for $39 in total (instead of $503). While I would not have signed up for all courses, it was cheaper than the courses that I was interested in. You find other deals such as The JavaScript Bundle, MySQL5 or iOS 8 to name a few. You can save hundreds of Dollars if you search for these deals or coupons.

General Tips

  1. One thing that I noticed while taking the courses was that you need to pay attention to the lecturer before you subscribe. Depending on where they come from, it may be difficult to understand them properly. That's where the preview comes in to help though
  2. You can play individual lessons as often as you want. This can be useful in several aspects, for instance to go back to a lesson while you are in the lab.
  3. The lesson comments can be useful as well and since you can leave comments of your own, there is a chance that other students or the teacher will respond to them.
  4. Lessons are marked as complete if you have watched the video from start to end or if supplementary files are downloaded.

This article was first seen on ComTek's "TekBits" Technology News

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